According to Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana of Sun Microsystem's MySQL Community Team, Sun was scheduled to reinforce the project's infrastructure this coming weekend, hoping to avoid this sort of downtime. But the power outage hit before the changes could be made.

"We're having a major power outage at Uppsala, Sweden where our servers are," Dups tells The Reg. "We had been planning for this exact scenario at Sun Microsystems and were planning on making the changes this Saturday. But as you know, sometimes Murphy's Law just cuts in! We're making our server and colo changes now instead. Please bear with us."

Wijayawardhana says the outage occurred about 5am Pacific time. But according to one user in Birmingham, UK, www.mysql.com, dev.mysql.com, bugs.mysql.com, and forum.mysql.com have been down for a bit longer - since about 4am Pacific. This, he says, is "making work a bit tricky."

Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL last year. And now that Sun itself is on the verge of being acquired by Oracle, many have wondered whether Larry Ellison and company have an eye on burying the MySQL project. "Wow, mysql.com is down," one user said via Twitter before Sun pinned the problem on a power outage. "Oracle buying Sun is really making me paranoid about this." ®

Update

Between 4pm and 4:30pm Pacific time, the sites were partially restored. "In talking to our systems engineers, I am happy to report that we now have most of our main sites running in a limited mode," Dups said. "At this time there maybe functionality that is disabled or unavailable. We expect to have full recovery and back to normal over the next 3-6 hours. We apologize for the inconvenience that this power failure has caused and thank the public for their patience."

Much the same message came from the MySQL Community Twitter feed: "Almost there, #MySQL.com is partially up and running, we're still working on it."

Update 2

At around 11pm Pacific, the MySQL Twitter feed announced that the sites were completely restored.